When Sandy spoke it was almost in a whisper. ‘Yes, I was babysitting that night. Gail said she needed to go out. There was something she needed to sort out, she said. Something urgent. I wanted to tell you.’ His eyes were pleading.

‘That’s why you were waiting outside the hotel?’

Sandy nodded. ‘But then I thought Gail had been so good to me, and she’d just lost her husband. I couldn’t bring myself to do it. How could I accuse her of murder when she’s been through so much?’

Gail started to whimper. The noise wasn’t loud enough to disturb the child in the next room, but it was piercing. It seemed to cut through Perez’s skin to his bone.

He turned to the woman. ‘You set up a meeting with Anna Blackwell and you killed her. And this afternoon you tried to kill me. You were worried your brother would pluck up the courage to tell me what was going on, and you drove straight at me in your Land Rover. You must have had Grace with you. How could you do that?’

Gail didn’t answer. She was sitting with her head in her hands and tears ran down her cheeks.

15

The Conclusion

Inspectors Anderson and Perez sat in the lounge bar of the Stonebridge Hotel. It was late and there were no other drinkers. It occurred to Perez that if the bar was always this empty, the owners were making very little money from the place. But perhaps it was busier in the summer. Then there would be tourists in the village and the bar would be full of talk and laughter.

‘I don’t understand why the Kerr woman killed Anna Blackwell.’ Anderson was staring into his beer. ‘You can’t blame us for missing that one, Jimmy.’

‘She was worried about losing the farm,’ Perez said. ‘Sandy’s wage was all that was keeping the place going. Gail knew that Anna was full of life and ideas. She must have known that the teacher would want to move on after a while. Gail and Grace wouldn’t have been able to stay at the farm without Sandy’s wage to support them.’

‘It doesn’t seem much of a motive.’ Anderson looked up from his glass. ‘And wasn’t Sandy going to move out anyway? I thought he was engaged.’

‘But to a local girl,’ Perez said. ‘Someone Gail knew and liked. Someone who’d probably be happy to move into the farm in the end, and who’d be able to help Gail carry out all the plans John had for the place. Anna was the sort of girl who would have had plans of her own.’

‘All the same . . .’Anderson wasn’t convinced.

‘You have to realise that Gail couldn’t see things clearly. She’d married later than most people and thought she’d found her soulmate. She and John and Grace were the family she’d dreamed of. Then John died.’

To Perez this sounded so like the story of him and his wife Fran and their Cassie that he struggled to keep control. He worried that he might break down. As Gail had done when Anderson arrested her.